PS: See that envelope and link straight above? I have added a Mail this Post plug-in to all my posts. If you read something interesting, now you can easily pass the link on.
The Laundry King may roll his eyes but even in an age of blogging, e-mail and Facebook, I enjoy Christmas cards that include a well-written, concise! letter with some of the highlights from the previous year. When time, geography and other factors can impede contact in person, I like to catch up on what has been happening in the lives of my family and friends. And that’s why I write such a letter myself.
In recent times, my Christmas letter has evolved from an A4 printed sheet, to a text e-mail and then to an e-mail with a pdf attachment. It seemed only natural that the next iteration should be an html e-mail with images and links.
I decided that my 2008 Christmas news would be an ideal project to try out some e-mail newsletter software before launching an html version of my occasional Serendipity Studio Newsletter. My research and call for reviews of newsletter software did not elicit much of a response. I first tried PHP List on the basis that Lisa Call has used it successully. In addition to being a talented textile artist, Lisa is a professional software engineer and perhaps I should have taken more notice when she said the set-up was not very intuitive. Not daunted, I slogged away for hours preparing the html coding for my newsletter and installing and configuring the software. I tested extensively (and successfully) using multiple e-mail addresses but, when it came to the real send, things fizzed. This may involve only a minor fix but, being a free product, the technical support is not immediately forthcoming so I moved to Plan B.
By contrast, or perhaps reflecting my upward movement on the learning curve, setting up Dada Mail was quite straightforward and the results more predictable. I successfully dispatched my first html newsletter soon after and have received some good feedback.
Despite this happy outcome, I feel the need to do further research on newsletter software. In particular, the Dada mail subscriber management features are very light on and it would be nice to have some open and click through tracking too. I may give PoMMo a whirl to see how it compares and Erica has mentioned iContact which appears to offer some more affordable pricing plans for accounts with a modest number of subscribers.
Now to write some snail mail cards…
Lisa Call says
Bummer php didn’t work for you – it’s quite the interesting piece of software.
Congrats for getting your xmas letters out with dada.
I still haven’t sent mine -pretty soon they could be valentines cards.